Oliver Hayes 
Halloween, 1992: The Broadcast That Fooled a Nation On October 31, 1992, around 11 million people settled in to watch what BBC1 was presenting as a live paranormal investigation: reporters inside a suburban London home, studio experts analyzing footage in real time, a phone line open for viewers to share their own ghost stories. By … Read more
Most people, pressed to name the first fast food restaurant, would say McDonald’s. A smaller group might mention White Castle. Almost no one would think of a mud-brick building in the Kangavar valley of western Iran, built around 3200 BC. Eating on the Go Is Older Than You Think At an archaeological site called Godin … Read more
The Face of a Paradox Picture a magazine cover from January 24, 1935: a round-cheeked, blue-eyed baby, selected by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as the living image of Aryan perfection. Picture also a soldier whose photograph ran in the Berliner Tageblatt in 1939 under the caption “The Ideal German Soldier,” his blond hair and … Read more
The Knightly Mirage Picture the medieval knight: gleaming armor, a code of honor, riding out to protect the innocent. That image has held up for centuries, and it is almost entirely wrong. The warriors who answered Pope Urban II’s call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 were not, for the most part, disciplined idealists. … Read more
The Rocket That Could Have Beaten Apollo The Soviet N-1 rocket had more raw thrust than the Saturn V. The machine that lost the Space Race was physically more powerful than the one that won it. Its first stage generated roughly 45,400 kilonewtons of force, making it the most powerful single rocket stage ever flown … Read more
The Rocket Plane That Wanted to Skip Across the Atmosphere In 1941, Austrian aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger handed the German Air Ministry a 900-page document outlining a plan to strike New York City from a launchpad in Europe, continue across the Atlantic and the United States, and land on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific, … Read more
The Wonder Nobody Can Find Six of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World left something behind. The Great Pyramid still stands. The Lighthouse of Alexandria left physical traces before its final collapse. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus left ruins behind. But the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Nothing. Not a foundation stone, not a clay tablet, … Read more
The Gap Between Public and Scholar A 2015 poll of roughly 4,000 people in Britain found that around 40% of respondents didn’t believe Jesus ever existed. That figure puts most of the public at odds with professional historians, who maintain a near-universal consensus that a Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical … Read more
Your Jaw Probably Can’t Do What the Movies Say It Can You’ve seen it in films: a character, caught in some desperate bind, grits their teeth and bites through their own finger to slip free of a restraint. Sheer willpower gets the job done. The scene cuts away, the character escapes, and nobody in the … Read more
The Night London Brought a Coffin to the Theater Picture a man in a dress, stomping on a theater bench, while the person beside him beats a frying pan. A pigeon wheels past the chandeliers. Somewhere in the gallery, a coffin is propped against the rail. On the stage below, actors are attempting Macbeth. Nobody … Read more